February 2012

March 20, 2011

Last night, I was at the CaveHenricks Books & Bytes party at SXSW 2011 in Austin TX with Barbara Cave-Henricks, Rusty Shelton and a host of people who love books: people who write books, who write and talk about books, people who publish books, above all, people who care about books.

Some of the discussion was along the lines of: “I like the smell of old books,” as Peter Georgescu, Chairman Emeritus, Young & Rubicam wrote recently. There’s nothing like the experience of a physical book.

For example, last night, Carol Sanford was clutching the first physical copies of her new book, The Responsible Corporation: Reimagining Sustainable and Success, like a baby. Carol is “on a mission to create a better world, and she believes that business can and will play a major role in accomplishing that. It’s more than just a responsibility program. Responsibility will be in the DNA of the business and everyone will participate to make a real difference.” Having the physical book in hand helps make the vision real.

And yet, some of the discussion was also along the lines of Fred Allen’s recent discourse on the subject: “I never would have expected this just a couple of years ago, but I do almost all my book reading electronically now. I use the Kindle apps on my iPad and iPod Touch. I love the versatility of the devices, that I can read while standing on line at the drugstore, or in bed without bothering my wife, and the fact that I can travel with a library effortlessly, instead of lugging around the piles of books I used to haul everywhere.”

When you think of someone reading a wonderful substantive book on a Kindle or an iPad, wouldn’t it be seductive to be able to digress, and listen to an aside by the author, what he or she was thinking when this passage was written, or a conversation with one of the participants, or a set of dazzling pictures of what was under discussion? Who would be able to resist this seduction?

Isn’t this ultimately what John Hagel, co-author of the path-breaking book, The Power of Pull (2010), was really talking about when he foreshadowed the end of the era of pushing products and services at customers, and manufacturing demand, and the beginning of a new era in which the winners will be those who can can “pull” people into a different world and interact with them. It’s a world focused on outcomes rather than outputs; on relationships rather than transactions; on people rather than things.

If the new kinds of books can make the future more understandable, more transparent, more accessible, bring it on!

February 26, 2011

My article, The Reinvention of Management" has just been published in a special issue of Strategy & Leadership on "outracing change: learning to foresee, adapt, re-invent and innovate faster." (Strategy & Leadership, 2011, Vol. 39 Issue: #2, pp.9 - 17)

The article explains why business leaders and writers are increasingly exploring a fundamental rethinking of the basic tenets of management. It synthesizes a number of books including my own book, The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management (2010) and shows how management is being reinvented with five fundamental shifts:

the firm's goal (a shift from inside-out to outside-in);

the role of managers (a shift from controller to enabler);

the mode of coordination (from command and control to dynamic linking);

the values practiced (a shift from value to values); and

the communications (a shift from command to conversation).

The raison d'être of the firm changes from a focus on efficiency and reducing transaction costs to scalable collaboration, learning and innovation. The shifts are interdependent: if only some shifts are made, the firm will slide back into hierarchical bureaucracy.

By adopting a people-centered goal, a people-centered role for managers, a people-centered coordination mechanism, people-centered values and people-centered communication the leaders of a firm can focus on the people who are its customers.

Cool, innovative & serious fun

If you would like to learn more about the reinvention of management for the 21st Century, please join me for a two day workshop on May 12-13, 2011 in Washington DC that is all about cool, innovative and serious fun. More details here.

February 18, 2011

Please join us for two days to Establish a Radical Management Mindset &Reinvent Business, Government, Education & Health

Each Spring for the past ten years, I have helped organize a gathering at the Smithsonian Associates in Washington DC focused on organizational storytelling. Seth Kahan and I are happy to announce along with our practice partners--Madelyn Blair, Rod Collins, Michelle James, Deborah Mills-Scofield and Peter Stevens--that this tradition will continue—with some exciting new elements—on May 12-13, 2011.

We think this will be a unique event where coolness, innovation and serious fun intersect, unlike any other conference you have ever been to, as Seth and I explain here.

We hope you will join us. Registration is available here now. Don't miss out. Places are limited.

When: From 8.30am Thursday May 12 to 5pm Friday May 13, 2011Where: downtown Washington DC What you will learn: In-depth learning about how to use storytelling to revolutionize the workplace and establish a radical management mindset. The first day will focus on co-creating the "big picture" principles of radical management as well as the practices involved in implementing the principles. It will include what is involved in creating an environment that brings everyone along. The second day will focus on working together in applying those principles and practices to your setting and showing you how you can take this forward.Who is giving it: The gathering is being organized by Steve Denning and Seth Kahan, along with their practice partners, Madelyn Blair, Rod Collins, Michelle James, Deborah Mills-Scofield and Peter Stevens.How will it be organized: It will be a highly interactive event. Rather than a conference where a series of speakers make presentations, it will be more like a conversation, woven together as an integrated and cohesive experience in which the focus is on co-creating and group learning.Books: Participants will receive a copy of the following books:

Steve Denning's The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management (2010)

Seth Kahan's Getting Change Right (2010)

Madelyn Blair's Essays in Two Voices (2011)

Rod Collins' Leadership in a Wiki World (2010)

Who should attend: It’s for anyone who is ready to join with us to help radically reinvent the world of work, whether you are a senior manager, thinker, activist, insurgent, speaker, leader, consultant, student, worker, whether you are in the private sector, the public sector, the health sector, the education sector or in an association. Registration:

Full registration: $597;

Early bird registration by March 31: $497

Group discount of 25% for three or more participants.

A limited number of student places are available.uu

Agenda for the two days:

The agenda will be a interactive conversation with the participants aimed at group learning.

Day one: The conversation will focus on the big picture:

why is work managed the way it is,

what are the principles of traditional management,

what has been learned about how to manage in a radically different way so as to generate continuous innovation, deep job satisfaction and client delight. It

what are the big shifts needed to reinvent work

what are the practices needed to support these shifts.

Day two: The conversation will shift to focus on how to apply the principles and practices of radical management in your own setting

where and how do I start?

how do I convince my boss? My colleagues?

what pitfalls should I anticipate?

how do I maintain momentum?

what do I do when things get blocked?

what help can I get?

A note from Seth and Steve

We would like to invite you to a gathering.

For two whole days, we want to share with you what we are jazzed about and we would like to get you equally inspired.

We are really excited that we will have four practice partners to help co-create the future with you.

This is a gathering for people who are intent on revolutionizing the world of work.

We want people who are tired of a world in which people are being treated as things, where employees are seen “human resources” and customers are seen as “demand” that has to be manufactured.

We are offering here more than a set of tools. We are seeking to create a state of mind that starts with a change of heart.

This is about locating that sweet spot where coolness, innovation and serious fun intersect. The fact that it also happens to be ultra efficient and productive is another big plus, because that means that the economics will drive it forward.

This is about creating stuff that people must have. And in the process, we stop wasting time on stupid things, spinning wheels, going through useless routines, attending management prayer meetings and spending endless amounts of time and energy on second-guessing what the boss wants.

It’s for those of us who want to escape from the mind-numbing confines of the cubicle culture, of budget crunches and endless reorganizations, and discover together what it takes to have a workplace that is truly different.

This gathering is the logical culmination of everything that the two of us have been talking about for the last ten years. We’ve been on a storytelling journey. We have come a long way and the journey has been rewarding. As our journey continues, we see the need to explore new territory so that we can get to a new level. We couldn’t undertake the next leg of the journey if we hadn’t already come so far.

We’re talking about getting things done at work in a way that uplifts the human spirit.

For quite a while, we spent time asking people to close their eyes and dare to imagine a workplace where everyone was pulling together and creating meaning for themselves and for the people for whom the work is done, a workplace where it was all for one and one for all.

Then we discovered that most people didn’t have to imagine it. They could remember it. They had experienced it, or something like it, at one time or another in their life. So most of us know what this is like: what we need to discover is how to replicate those experiences, reliably and on a sustainable basis.

It’s creating about workplaces where the human spirit sings, where we realize that life is worth living. That life has meaning. That we are doing something that matters.

We don’t care if your current workplace resembles a festering petri dish, or a paradise of joy, curiosity, and peak performance, or is somewhere in between.

And the good news is that this world is within reach. Our goal is to show you how to reach it.

It’s about generating workplaces where deeper meaning replaces the drab grind of repetition with challenging and compelling work that elevates the soul.

It’s about having fun with the talents and intelligence that we’ve been given and finding our place in the ever shifting realms of doing something meaningful with our lives, something that matters.

We hope you will join us.

Seth and Steve

What you will learn

Why organizations are managed the way they are today and what can be done to transform them and create a world in which people can find sustenance and inspiration

How to instill a new mental model of radical management so that organizations create continuous innovation, deep job satisfaction and client delight.

Specific actionable tools to enable you to reinvent your workplace and establish radical management as the norm for your organization.

How to go beyond learning how to use a new set of tools, but also a quality change—how to put the heart back in the workplace.

How to achieve a shift in focus from manipulating customers and employees as things, to one of instead interacting with customers and employees as people.

How to find new ways to interact with customers and employees and to add more value for them and provide that value sooner.

How to understand the world of the client or stakeholder.

What are the specific practices that will help delight customers, clients and stakeholders.

How to measure client delight.

How you can add more value to those people sooner.

How to organize and sustain self-organizing teams.

What is the role of manager as enabler rather than controller.

How to organize work in short cycles so as to ensure steady progress towards the goal of customer or stakeholder delight.

What are the values that support organizational transformation, particularly radical transparency and continuous improvement.

What are the practices that support those values.

How to shift communications from command to conversation.

What are the specific practices that support that shift.

How to use storytelling to inspire organizations to become curators of the human spirit

How to inspire business, government and social sector organizations to reinvent themselves and create a work-world of life-enhancing practices and values.

How to create a world with meaning that reveals our deepest values, our very core, as human beings.

Why most organizations today are much less productive than they were fifty years ago.

Which organizations have discovered how to create simultaneously high productivity, continuous innovation, deep job satisfaction and client delight.

How to inspire workplaces that generate fiercer passion so that innovation becomes as natural as drawing breath.

How to move forward, even on those miserable days when the cause seems hopeless, when the guardians of the status quo are doing their darnedest to prevent change, and everyone is discouraged and tempted to abandon the challenge.

How to inspire others to take the future into their own hands and change the world themselves.

How to stimulate others to summon up the energy and the ingenuity to overcome the forces of soul-destroying stagnation and create a new world.

Our practice partners

Madelyn Blair: Madelyn Blair, Ph.D., founded Pelerei, Inc. in 1988, a company dedicated to helping organizations and individuals move to the next level. She is on the faculty of Kent State University in the IAKM graduate program. She is a Taos Associate, the co-moderator of Worldwide Story Work, and a teaming partner with PwC. Before Pelerei, she was a division chief at the World Bank. Her most recent work is on the creation of radical learning environments. Madelyn is the author of Riding the Current: How to Deal with the Daily Deluge of Data, Essays in Two Voices: Dual Dialogues of Discovery, and Riding the Current: The Way to Successful Sailing on the Edge of New Knowledge (2011)

Rod Collins is the owner of Wiki-Management and an expert in collaborative management practices. He helps business leaders successfully manage accelerating change by changing how they manage. Rod is the former Chief Operating Executive of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Federal Employee Program (FEP), one of the nation's largest business alliances, with over $19 billion in annual revenues. Under Rod's leadership, FEP increased its market share by 10 points and achieved unprecedented operational performance. He is the author of the Leadership in A Wiki World (2010).

Michelle James has been pioneering Applied Creativity and Applied Improvisation in business in the Washington, DC area since the mid-nineties. She is CEO of The Center for Creative Emergence and founder of the Capitol Creativity Network . Her mission is to integrate the worlds of creativity, service, meaning and business and cultivate whole-brain, whole-person engagement in the workplace. She's designed and delivered hundreds of programs for entrepreneurs, leaders, and organizations such as Microsoft, Deloitte, GEICO, Teach for America, Center for Nonprofit Advancement, National Institutes of Heath, The World Bank, Invest Northern Ireland and Kaiser Permanente among others. Her passion for improv led her to develop Quantum Leap Business Improv, and in 2009 year she produced a sold-out Creativity in Business Conference with the next one coming up in October of this year.

Deborah Mills-Scofield helps companies create actionable, measurable, adaptable, and profitable innovation and strategic plans.While at AT&T Bell Labs she received a patent for what became one of their top revenue-generating services.She was instrumental in creating AT&T’s entrance into the Internet and E-commerce marketplace.Deb’s love of innovation – from products/services to management - includes mentoring entrepreneurs in Northeast Ohio, Brown’s Entrepreneurship Program, and seniors in Brown’s Women's Launch Pad Program.

Peter Stevens is a coach in the software development approach known as Scrum (one of the forerunners or subsets of radical management). He is trainer and mentor with a passion for helping organizations become more effective at creating great products and services. He has helped many organizations successfully adopt or optimize their use of agile methods. He writes the Scrum Breakfast blog and is a regular contributor to AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com. His popular articles include 10 Contracts for Your Next Agile Software Project and Explaining Story Points to Management.Peter started his career as a Software Engineer at Microsoft in 1982. Today, he is the initiator of the Lean Agile Scrum Interest Group of the SwissICT and co-founder of DasScrumTeam AG, a partnership of leading Scrum trainers and coaches in Central Europe.

February 04, 2011

Jeffry Liker and Mike Rother have an interesting article entitled Why Lean Programs Fail. By “lean”, they mean the way of manufacturing developed by Toyota and others, and described in the classic book, The Machine That Changed the World. Lean is a change in management paradigm that was as monumental as the shift from craft-style to mass production.

The focus of lean is on providing the customer with more value sooner. Lean can be seen as a subset of radical management in the context of manufacturing, just as Scrum and Agile can be seen as subsets of radical management in the context of software development.

Lean is more than new processes

Although the studies described in The Machine That Changed the World showed that lean was a significantly more efficient and effective way to run a manufacturing plant, a large survey conducted by Industry Week in 2007 found that only 2 percent of companies that have a lean program achieved their anticipated results. More recently, the Shingo Prize committee, which gives awards for excellence in lean manufacturing, went back to past winners and found that many had not sustained their progress after winning the award.

Why is implementing lean so difficult?

Liker and Rother says that when you look at a Toyota plant, you see many good ideas, but they are not the standardized and implemented in all Toyota plants in the exactly same way. The experts don’t tell the plants what to do and audit them to see if they are following the best practices.

A new culture of learning

Instead what you see is the result of many small steps, some of which were discarded and others embraced. It was the result of many cycles of plan-do-check-act (PDCA). As result, practices are different throughout Toyota because different organizations are on different learning cycles.

The management task is not to impart a routine for doing work, but rather to inspire new work habits and mindsets for continually improving the work. That inspiration is missing in organizations that use top-down management objectives, so managers have no choice but to blindly start cutting things.

In one organization, Liker observed that the chief operating officer holding plant managers accountable for running a certain number learning events to achieve a certain level of productivity improvement. It became slash-and-burn lean with no sustainability and no continuous improvement, i.e., old school, outcome focused, carrot and stick motivation.

Continuous improvement is a way to achieve things that you don't necessarily know how you are going to achieve. A mentor does this by giving those learning a challenge. Even if the mentor has a notion of how the challenge might be achieved, he or she does not share it with the learners. The task is to lead the learners into developing good habits for working through problems, via intensive questioning-based coaching on this problem.

It is fundamentally about a way of thinking and acting that is very different from the top-down bureaucracy that is still pervasive in large organizations and educational systems today.

A new culture of learning in education

In their exciting new book, A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown show how the same issues play out in the education system. The current test-driven system, where the teachers always have "the right answers" and the object of teaching is to impart these right answers to the students, doesn't equip for the jobs that lie ahead of them, where they will have to change careers a number of times during their life. Education becomes, not the acquisition of a fixed set of knowledge and skills, but rather creating an environment that facilitates learning and instills the capacity and the passion to go on learning throughout life.

January 30, 2011

In earlier posts that began with The Reinvention of Management: Part 1, I noted that current management practices represent a set of economic, social and political problems of the first order, which cannot be resolved by a single fix.

Instead, a whole host of business leaders and writers, including Umair Haque, John Hagel, John Seely Brown, Lang Davison, Rod Collins, Ranjay Gulati and Carol Sanford are exploring a fundamental rethinking of the basic tenets of management aimed at creating organizations that are capable of continuous innovation. Among the most important changes being proposed are five basic shifts in management practice:

In this final post in the series, I explore in more detail the specific practices needed to implement the transition implicit in these five fundamental shifts.

Set aside traditional change management

In the first place, before heading pell-mell into the implementation of these five radical shifts in management, one has to set aside the traditional mode of implementing change.

If you have mastered the arguments of this series so far, you will know not to proceed by an eight-step top-down hierarchical rollout of a program, embodying a preconceived idea, articulated in some back room by outsiders, and then imposed with one-way communications that tell people what to do.

You will know that that kind of thinking and acting is precisely what has brought us to the current impasse. You will know that it must be a process that gives due respect to the interests not only of the organization but also of those doing the work and of those for whom the work is done. You will intuit that communications will be interactive and respectful of the individuals involved while giving due attention to productivity and innovation.

And you will be certain of one thing: that radical change management will not be a simple recipe that you can wrap up and take back to your organization to apply without modification tomorrow morning, with any expectation of success. You know that you will have to create a story of your own—one that fits your own context—its possibilities and its constraints. You also know that you will have to adapt the story on the fly as conditions shift.

In one sense, all it takes is a change of heart.At the same time, as Rachel Maddow has noted on MSNBC: there is not such thing as an innovation fairy that will magically make innovation happen. You actually have to go out into the workplace and make it happen.

In doing this, it can be helpful to know the practices that have been successful in the past in reflecting and implementing this change of heart.

Practices that implement the transition

In previous implementation of the five shifts, the following practices have been helpful:

1. Make the change happen organically: Change begins when a single individual takes responsibility for the future and decides to make it happen. The individual may be the CEO. In a large organization, it is more typically someone in middle management. The individual begins inspiring other people. In turn, they become champions and inspire still others.

2. Launch a small high-performance team: A small high-performance team will be needed to inspire and guide implementation. Dutiful or representative performance won’t get the job done. This will be a group that is creative and energized, trusts one another, passionately believes in the cause and is willing to do whatever it takes. Dutiful or representative performance won’t get the job done. This will be a group that is creative and energized, trusts one another, and is willing to do whatever it takes.

3. Do it quickly: The change happens quickly or not all. Once organizational change takes off, the process will be viral in nature. The idea is either growing, spreading, and propagating itself, or dying and de-energizing people and spawning new constraints. A top-down process that is grinding it out, step by step, unit by unit, is usually generating antibodies that lead to mediocre implementation or total failure.

4. Let the change idea evolve: The change idea itself will steadily evolve. This is not a matter of crafting a vision and then rolling it out across the organization. This is about continuously adapting the idea to the evolving circumstances of the organization. As the organization and everyone in it adapts the story of change to their own context, each individual comes to own it. The process of adaptation never ends.

5. Run the change process on human passion: The change process will run on human passion—a firm belief in the clarity and worth of the idea and the courage to stand up and fight for it. No template or detailed rollout plan can inspire the energy, passion, and excitement that are needed to make deep change happen.

6. Focus the passion: It will be focused, disciplined passion. This is not an approach where anything goes. There will be a tight focus on the goal and continuing alertness to head off the diffusion of energy into related or alternative goals. Progress is assessed and adjustments made based on what has been learned. There will be systematic feedback on what value is being added. There will be freedom to create, but within clearly delineated, adjustable limits.

7. Get outside help but don’t rely on it: Outside help will be used but not depended on. Intellectual energy is generated by cognitive diversity and interactions with people with different backgrounds and ways of looking at the world. The external advice will be received, evaluated, and adapted to local needs. In the process of adaptation, the idea will become owned. Things are not done simply because outsiders say so; they will be done because they make sense for this context.

8. The top of the organization must support it and be supported: Although implementation cannot be accomplished by top-down directives or rollout programs, the support of the very top of the organization is key to creating the umbrella for change, for setting direction and heading off the inevitable threats to the idea. Yet the top alone cannot make it happen. In a large organization, the top will need many others to communicate the idea throughout the organization in an authentic way.

9. The idea is more important than any individual: Top-down change programs typically die when the manager leaves. The replacement manager sweeps clean what has gone before. By contrast, when a change has taken root in an organic fashion, the idea continues to live because it is owned by wide array of people.

10. Proceed through conversations: One person starts talking to and inspiring other people, who in turn have the courage, determination, and communication skills to fire up fresh groups of people to imagine and implement a different future. In turn, they become champions and inspire others.

11. Establish a beachhead: All of the successful large-scale implementations had at least some people on hand who had seen it and done it before and could say, “I’ve seen this work!” Creating a beachhead of such people is thus an important early step.

12. Begin in a safe space: In the first few iterations, bumps and bruises are to be expected. Until people get the hang of it, some missteps are likely.. It is therefore prudent to try it out in the first instance in a relatively safe and low-profile space.

13. Agree on a common terminology: When fundamentally different ideas are being introduced, confusions and misunderstandings are inevitable. To the extent that a common terminology can be defined, made easily accessible, and consistently used, the transition will be easier.

14. Communicate the Idea through stories: Springboard stories communicate the spirit of an idea and generate new stories in the minds of the listeners, which drive them into action and spark more stories that are told to others. Rehearse your story before you get to making a presentation. Be ready when the opportunity calls.

15. Practice total openness. Just as the workplace depends on radical transparency, so does the change process itself. For example in the transition at Salesforce.com, all of the daily meetings were held in a public place so that everyone could see how things were progressing. A task board was displayed on the public lunch room wall so that everyone had access to what was going on. The willingness to share information with everyone enabled people to adapt on a daily basis to what was happening.

17. Work sustainable hours: Although occasional crises may require extended working periods, regularly working long hours is highly unproductive and leads to low-quality output. Long working hours are a sign of serious management malfunction.

18. Implement the five shifts as an integrated package: None of the shifts is individually new. What is new is implementing all five shifts together at the same time. For instance, implementing client focus and staff empowerment will come to grief if they are not coordinated by dynamic linking or if communications take place in a command-and-control mode. Nor will the change likely to be successful if it is pursued in an organization where there is a single-minded focus on efficiency and making money for shareholders, rather than instilling the values of client focus, radical transparency and continuous improvement throughout the organization.

In the end, the gains are accomplished by a transition from a focus on things (goods, services, money) to a focus on people (customers and employees). A successful transformation requires the organization to adopt a people-centered goal, a people-centered role for managers, a people-centered coordination mechanism, people-centered values and people-centered communication–so as to focus the firm on the people who are its customers.

To learn more:

To learn more about reinventing management so as to spark continuous innovation, read the whole series:

December 22, 2010

As we enter this festive season, in addition to wishing you and your family all the best for the holidays and the New Year, I wanted to share with you my new year’s resolutions, beginning with a quote from Albert Einstein that I love:

If at first an idea is not absurd, there is no hope for it.

Why is this so meaningful to me? Almost exactly ten years ago today, in December 2000, when I left my position as Program Director of Knowledge Management at the World Bank, I set out to convert the world to the power of storytelling. I did so because I saw in leadership storytelling a way to make the world a more humane and better place than the grim humorless workplaces that I saw all around me. At the time, people told me that my goal was quixotic, even absurd.

During those ten years, many people around the world have come to embrace leadership storytelling. As a result of the efforts of myself and many others, it is now commonplace to find leadership storytelling discussed and promoted in even the most conservative business journals. Most leadership textbooks now have a section on storytelling. Business schools now often include segments on storytelling in their courses on leadership. Major corporations have taken it up as a central leadership theme. In broad terms, the intellectual battle to have storytelling accepted in the world of work has been won. What was once seen as absurd is now viewed as obvious.

Yet the grim humorless workplaces are still everywhere. That war has still to be fought.

Thus I have come to see that storytelling by itself is not enough. In organizations today, we find a set of attitudes, practices and values that cripple the human spirit and hamstring creativity and innovation. Fortunately, we now have robust evidence of something that we have instinctively known for a long time, namely, that these attitudes, practices and values are leading to failure even according to their own traditional criteria, such as the rate of return on assets, the life expectancy of a firm in the Fortune 500, the engagement of those doing the work or their capacity to create employment.[1]

We also know that these attitudes, values and practices have infected our education system which no longer provides an education that fits our children for the future and our health system, which, quite apart from the recent health reform, is heading the country towards bankruptcy.

I believe that the time is therefore ripe to take on the broader challenge of reinventing those attitudes, practices and values so that our organizations become curators of the human spirit rather than its destroyer.

The next ten years: a new challenge

Having decided to take on the gargantuan challenge—once again, I am hearing that the goal is absurd—of inspiring the Fortune 500 (along with the health and education sectors) to reinvent themselves and run their affairs in a way that is radically different from what most of them are doing today, I will need to lead through a combination of clear thinking, courage and leadership storytelling.

I will tell stories that show why most of the firms in the Fortune 500 are much less productive than they were fifty years ago, not because managers have forgotten how to manage but rather because the economic context has shifted and management hasn’t. I will also tell stories that show how some organizations have discovered how to manage in a radically different way that leads simultaneously to high productivity, continuous innovation, deep job satisfaction and client delight.

More than an idea: a social movement

To succeed, I will need to tell authentically true stories that capture many people’s imagination and engage them to inspire others to keep doing more. The stories will need to grow and evolve as listeners, readers and followers become a central part of the journey and participate in it and co-create it.

I will join with other authors, leaders and activists, who share this vision and do whatever I can to encourage and support them in their work. We will all need to deploy new forms of storytelling, with different strands of the story being told across multiple platforms at the same time, creating a deeply immersive experience and generating what Justine Musk has called: “world worthy of devotion”.

To create this world of life-enhancing practices, attitudes and values, we will need to convey meaning that reveals our deepest values, our very core, as human beings. We will need to inspire people to move forward, even on those miserable days when the cause seems hopeless, when the guardians of the status quo are doing their darnedest to prevent change, and everyone is discouraged and tempted to abandon the challenge.

We will need to create a world in which people can find sustenance and inspiration. Obviously, none of us can change the world alone. Ultimately, it’s about all of us inspiring others to take the future into their own hands and change the world themselves. We can give ideas and stimulation but ultimately it is others who will have to summon up the energy and the ingenuity to overcome the forces of soul-destroying stagnation and create a new world.

Eventually, this meaning will need to reach many people through multiple vehicles. It will begin with face-to-face conversations and then spread by books, articles, meetings, conferences, webinars, networks, communities, emails, websites, blogs, social media or whatever – each creating more communities and networks that link up to other communities and networks, and so create a social movement that is broad and deep.

The movement will need to be as much about listening as it will be about speaking: listening to the voices that emerge, the voices of their hopes, their deeper aspirations and their fears, giving everyone, including our seeming opponents or enemies, our respect. It’s about letting the ideas grow and evolve, all the time paying attention to life.

If you would like to join with me and help in any capacity--as participant, discussant, commentator, thinker, writer, editor, contributor, correspondent, activist, insurgent, speaker, leader, follower, muse, whatever-- to tackle this massive but worthwhile challenge, let me know.

I would love to hear from you!

POSTSCRIPT DECEMBER 25, 2010:

Owing to the strong response from all around the world to my "manifesto", I have launched a Google Group, called Revolutionizing the World of Work.

The object of the Group is:

• inspiring business, government & social sector organizations to reinvent themselves & create a work-world of life-enhancing practices & values • launching a broad social movement that uses storytelling to capture people’s imagination that inspires organizations to become curators of the human spirit.

December 15, 2010

"My dream? To retire," a 35 year old man tells me. Something is very wrong with this society.”

Paulo Coelho

Of all modern management’s sins, one of the least recognized is its boredom and its neglect of beauty. After all, life was once viewed as beautiful, even though it’s hard to recall this when reading management books or looking at the working life of most people today. Wealth doesn’t seem to help. As the economy advances, the workplace doesn’t become less dreary, with its total focus on analysis, optimization, and the bottom line. If a glimmer of beauty accidentally occurs in a modern organizational setting, it’s usually regarded as an embarrassment: it will be dealt with by a rhetoric that has no aesthetic sensitivity to begin with.

But what use is a life of work if there isn’t a scintilla of beauty within it? As work consumes more and more of people’s waking hours, the systematic draining of beauty from their lives becomes a graver and graver problem.

This is one of the contributions of storytelling—that of restoring beauty to the workplace. With a well-turned phrase, an elegant telling, a story creates the shapeliness of the beginning, middle, and ending. Through the story’s tensions and resolutions, both the teller and the audience experience continuing coherent existence. These elements can add beauty to lives that are otherwise bereft of it, like flowers making their way through the cracks in a vast cement pavement.

By contrast, the control mode of management is deadening. You can recognize it in the gray feeling that comes over you when you participate in a departmental meeting, listening to the voice that drones on with announcements of “new findings” that could hardly be more banal, or of the latest reorganization that is so like the previous one, or the fatuous anodynes for managers in distress. These are stagnant waters in which no living thing flourishes.

The dreariness of the modern workplace has been attacked so often that it might seem a waste of time to criticize it further. Yet there are grounds for doing so. While the cause of its ugliness—the controlling approach to leadership—is deadly, it’s not dead. Unfortunately, it’s horrifyingly active and energetic, like a garrulous bore who won’t stop talking. In fact it’s this restless energy that suggests the possibility—and even the hope—of change.

For organizations that are run in the control mode, beauty currently has to steal back into departments by way of postcards pinned to cubicle walls, muttered jokes, underground discussions, hurried lunches, or clandestine romances, while the management tries to redirect attention toward mounting a never-ending career ladder. The goal is to get people to focus on minuscule salary increments and relative enhancements of standing—a fancier title or a marginally larger workspace.

What storytelling offers is an escape route from this mortuary by suggesting a type of leadership that includes meaning as well as beauty. Story responds to our human curiosity to know how the world is connected together and to our longing for shapely forms. We not only look for narrative patterns—we yearn for them. We want to know what happens and also that it will make sense. We suffer the hunger for meaning and cannot resist its satisfaction. Through story we experience the many levels of the self as well as a deeper coherence of the world.

Through story, we learn to see each other and ourselves, and come to love what we see as well as acquire the power to change it. In this way we come to terms with our past, our present, and our future.

Through story, we can put an end to the worry, the fever, and the fret of trying to live instrumentally. Finally, we can simply be.

Excerpted from chapter 12 of the Second Edition of The Leader's Guide to Storytelling which is being published by Jossey-Bass in February 2011.

December 13, 2010

Through sources that cannot be revealed, I have obtained a draft of President Obama’s opening address to the one-day summit of corporate chief executives planned for this Wednesday December 15, 2010. This is what the draft says:

Thank you for coming here today. This is a moment of grave national peril. Our peril does not lie in the attacks from any enemy abroad. The peril lies in the fact that we are a nation in economic decline. The decline does not relate to the deep recession we are currently experiencing, although that is also a symptom. The decline is much deeper and longer lasting. The decline has been occurring through the administrations of both parties. Fundamentally, the decline resides in the now well-documented fact that our economy, particularly the private sector, is no longer providing a good living for all its citizens. That is the crux of the matter. You and I know that the public sector does not have the resources to subsidize or fill that gap.

And there are even bigger problems on the horizon. Our education system no longer provides an education that fits our children for the future. Our health system, quite apart from the health reform that we recently passed, is heading the country towards bankruptcy. Equally, the social security system is heading towards insolvency.

That in a nutshell, is what this meeting is about. It is about the very future of our nation.

I am sure that you have come here to tell me what I, as the head of the public sector in this country, should do. And I am ready to listen to that. I know that you will tell me that we need less regulation. I know that you will tell me that we need more promotion of international trade, like the deal with South Korea that we just completed. I know that you will tell me that you need more clarity and predictability as to what the tax regime will be and how the health reform will be implemented. I accept those needs and I am working with my colleagues to resolve them with a sense of dire urgency and importance, within the constraints that I face.

Let me be blunt. The public sector cannot grow the economy. What the public sector can do is provide the framework for growth. But ultimately the growth depends on the private sector. The private sector is the engine of the economy. And that engine is broken.

So I want to spend at least half the time of this meeting listening to what you have to say, and what you are going to do, about certain facts for which, you the private sector are responsible.

The fact that the rate of return on assets of US firms is one quarter of what it was in 1965.

The fact that the life expectancy of a firm in the Fortune 500 has fallen to 15 years and continues to decline.

The fact that only one of five workers is fully engaged in his or her work. The larger the firm, the less the engagement. This is not just a matter of job satisfaction: in a world of knowledge work, engagement is the key determinant of productivity.

The "topple" rate of leading organizations is accelerating.

The fact that established organizations between 1980 and 2005 produced no new net jobs for the US economy.

These are not funny numbers. They are not government numbers. These are numbers that come from you, the private sector. Our economists have checked them. We believe that they are robust. I am giving you the headlines. We are going to have more briefings about the details, sector by sector, throughout the morning.

The facts that I mention are not short-term blips that have occurred as a result of the financial meltdown. They are long-term trends that have continued for over fifty years through both Democratic and Republican administrations. They are deep and they are real.

I am sure that some of you will tell me that these numbers don’t apply to your organization. I accept that. Each of you has been chosen to come today because your own firm is doing well. So to simplify the discussion, there is no need to tell me that your own firm is in fine shape financially and growing rapidly. I also accept that your own firms are not achieving their apparent financial prosperity by shipping jobs to China or by clever financial manipulation.

I suggest that we base this part of the discussion on the entire set of Fortune 500 companies, particularly those who are not represented here today. We will examine the health of the private sector as a whole. Let us discuss why we are looking at these sustained fifty year old declines, in terms of rate of return on assets, in terms of the life expectancy of firms, in terms of the engagement of the workforce, and in terms of the ability to create jobs.

Just as you want to hear what I am doing the problems for which I am responsible, so I want to hear your ideas about the root causes of the problems for which the private sector is responsible. There are voices within the private sector who say that these problems have not arisen because the private sector has forgotten how to manage. They say that these problems have arisen because the economy has changed in fundamental ways while the way we are managing our organizations hasn’t.

As possible causes, these voices point to the massive shift in the balance of power from seller to buyer, which imply that our organizations must be more responsive to the needs of the marketplace. And they point to the shift in the nature of work from semi-skilled work to knowledge work. These two massive shifts mean that the hierarchical bureaucracies that were so successful fifty years ago can no longer prosper for long in today’s world. In short, they believe that we have to run our institutions differently if we are to be successful in the 21st Century.

I don’t expect you at this meeting to come up with an action plan to deal with problems of the scale and complexity that are represented by these numbers. I want to spend half the time of this meeting getting your suggestions about what I can do about my side of the problems. But I also want us to spend half of the time here at this meeting, getting a deeper understanding of the private sector side of the problem in all its ramifications and what you can do about that.

I want us to meet again in a month. At that meeting, I will present to you what I am doing about the problems that I, as the head of the public sector, am responsible. And I want you to present to me then what you, as the leaders of the private sector, are doing about the problems for which the private sector is responsible.

All of us sitting around this table receive very generous compensation for what we do. Some say that, given the problems we are facing, the compensation is excessively generous, but let us all agree that it is generous. One reason that the compensation is generous is that people look to us as leaders. We are expected to show the way forward, not just for the few people who report to us, but for the entire nation. I accept this responsibility for the public sector. I am asking you to accept this responsibility on behalf of the private sector as a whole. Our nation is looking to us. I believe we need to respond.

Will President Obama deliver this speech on Wednesday? I don’t yet know. I do know that there are people in his immediate circle advising him to be less confrontational and more conciliatory, while others are urging him to press ahead and confront the real issues that the economy is facing. Only time will tell which side will win. Stay tuned.

December 11, 2010

A lot of people loved my blog post on the most beautiful blog in the world. So here's another shot: the world's most beautiful statistics. Statistics come to life when Swedish academic superstar Hans Rosling graphically illustrates global development in 200 countries over the last 200 years in just 4 minutes. For once, 120,000 numbers look clear, meaningful and, let's face it, beautiful. Wow!